Thursday, January 21, 2010

The NYT this morning has a piece with the ominous title "Foreign Languages Fade in Class" and using the reverse-direction-in-the-subtitle move "— Except Chinese", and opens with this line:

Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade, according to a government-financed survey — dismal news for a nation that needs more linguists to conduct its global business and diplomacy.

Yup, that's raw stupidity on our collective part. (I won't try to figure out where it stands compared to having a significant part of the country without health coverage or to invading foreign countries justified by lies, but ... .)

But the article cites work by the Center for Applied Linguistics and this link shows the more interesting broader picture, not in numbers of students but in numbers of schools offering a given language. Big increase in Chinese, tiny increases in Italian and Hebrew, Spanish stable and the rest declining.

The cliche is that Spanish has taken over language education, and this shows that — it can hardly grow at this point by this measure. More striking is the dramatic decrease in French. The decline of German (following the decline of Russian) is old news, to the point that German is now considered a LCTL, 'less commonly taught language' (pronounced /lɪktl/), in some circles.